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expeditions and five seaborne searches canvassed the Gulf coast before the last uncovered the ruins of the French settlement (and redeemed the captive children, who had mixed emotions about being torn from their new families and hauled off to live among the Spanish in Mexico).
    Besides prompting this fresh wave of exploration, La Salle’s doomed experiment inspired the Spanish to fortify Texas as a buffer against further foreign incursions. They began establishing missions along a route—
el camino real,
or “the king’s highway”—stretching from the Rio Grande to East Texas (and briefly beyond the Sabine River into Louisiana). The most important and durable of the missions were clustered about the upper San Antonio River. The mission of San Antonio de Valero, senior among the cluster, was founded in 1718 with seventy men, women, and children and nearly two thousand sheep, cattle, horses, and oxen. The adjacent presidio, or fort, of San Antonio de Béxar was established at the same time. Competition among the missions—and especially among the missionaries—hampered the growth of the community, but reinforcements arrived in 1731 in the persons of fifty immigrants from the Spanish Canary Islands. Gradually the community coalesced into a regular, if not exactly thriving, town. By the 1770s, when it became the capital of Spanish Texas, it had a population of about two thousand.
    The Franciscan order staffed the missions, which, like all Spanish missions, received the dual mandate of spreading the gospel of the Lord and the power of the Spanish crown. The soldiers attached to the missions similarly doubled up, protecting the friars and others at the missions from hostile Indians (and from any Frenchmen who might appear) and encouraging the less bellicose natives to heed the words of the friars.
    The missions were expensive and only intermittently successful. Some of the Indians who accepted baptism were evidently sincere in their adopted faith; others simply preferred their prospects under the Spanish to the depredations of Apache and Comanche raiders. Troubles between church and state in both old Spain and New Spain spilled over onto the frontier, and the commitment of the government to the missions rose and fell on the fall and rise in relations with France: when France seemed a threat, Texas appeared important; when France was friendly, Texas diminished. After France ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1762 (lest it be taken by the British, to whom the French were losing the Seven Years’ War), the Texas missions lost nearly all their strategic value. The more distant ones, in East Texas, were abandoned and their personnel withdrawn along the Camino Real to San Antonio de Béxar and points south.

    During the half century after 1770, Spain felt peculiarly vulnerable to foreign incursion. The war that began in Boston in 1775 between Britain and her North American colonies spread by the end of the decade to include France (allied directly to the Americans) and Spain (allied to France). The American-French-Spanish side won, but the victory was a mixed blessing for the Americans’ European partners. Spain found itself confronting the Americans as neighbors across the Mississippi. More threatening, the success of the American Revolution set the spirit of republicanism loose upon the world. Every throne of Europe felt the ground rumble beneath its feet; within a decade of the war’s end, the most glorious throne—that occupied by the Sun King of France and his heirs—was swallowed by the earthquake the Americans started.
    In the wake of the revolution in France, Napoleon Bonaparte erected a new empire on the rubble of the
ancien régime
. Bonaparte’s empire briefly reached to North America, after the Corsican wrested what was left of Louisiana—that is, the part of Louisiana that didn’t belong to the United States—back from Spain. Napoleon envisioned reopening the